Afghanistan's Opium Output Drops Sharply, U.N. Survey Shows
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
September 27, 1998
Bad weather and tensions with neighboring Iran have slashed the opium production of Afghanistan and hampered its opium exports for European heroin markets, according to a new United Nations survey.
The United Nations Drug Control Program estimated last year that Afghanistan had become the world's largest producer of opium, surpassing Myanmar. The opium is refined into heroin and morphine en route to Europe and elsewhere.
But heavy rains, hailstorms and earthquakes this year have wiped out one-quarter of the expected opium crop in Afghanistan, said Pino Arlacchi, the program's executive director. Mr. Arlacchi said in an interview that the Afghan poppy harvest this year was expected to produce 2,300 tons of raw opium, compared with 3,100 tons last year. He said the crop failure in central and southern Afghanistan, including the poppy-rich provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, had been reported by Afghan surveyors for the United Nations program, who travel from village to village to interview officials and poppy farmers.
The rugged and remote terrain of Afghanistan, its history of lawlessness and chaotic warfare and the absence of a central Government helped opium flourish in recent years while the militant Islamic movement called the Taliban seized most of the country.
When Mr. Arlacchi visited Afghanistan last November, Taliban leaders promised to wipe out opium poppy production. They also promised to eliminate new planting in return for development aid from the United Nations, which operates a $14 million-a-year drug-control program in Afghanistan.
But the latest survey, Mr. Arlacchi said, showed that poppy cultivation had increased more than 9 percent since last year and had spread to two eastern provinces where it had not been reported earlier.
''The religious leader of the Taliban would cooperate with us,'' Mr. Arlacchi said. ''But the movement is too fragmented to act.''
The United States estimates that Afghanistan produced 1,400 tons of opium last year, a smaller figure based on satellite photos but not ground-level research. Its estimate this year is not yet public.
World production of opium may total 5,000 to 5,500 tons in 1998, according to United Nations estimates. Based on a 10-to-1 ratio for refining, the Afghan shortfall of 770 tons of opium means a potential loss of 77 tons of heroin.
''It's a result that cannot be attributed to a strong antidrug action by the Taliban,'' Mr. Arlacchi said. If the Taliban are not more helpful, he added, he will ask the United States and other countries that are financing a development program to use that money to block drug exports.
The deployment of tens of thousands of Iranian troops along the western border of Afghanistan this month in response to the killing of a group of Iranian diplomats by Taliban fighters has also cut established smuggling routes to heroin refineries in eastern Turkey.
As a result, the price of raw opium on the Iranian-Afghan border has soared to $50 to $77 a pound, up from $18 to $32 a pound last year, Mr. Arlacchi said.
The disruption of smuggling routes to the west has led traffickers to find circuitous routes north through Tajikistan and south through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.
Mr. Arlacchi said he did not expect the European price of Afghan-derived heroin to rise significantly because a year's supply is stockpiled along the smuggling corridor through Turkey and the Balkans.